Tour de Ireland (A cycling fan's ride around Ireland) is the story of a cyclist's return to his native country. It is an attempt to re-engage with home and re-discover the ancient land of saints and scholars that is Ireland. The journey, which takes place during the 2012 Tour de France, is also an engagement with the sport of cycling both past and present. This is by no means a book solely for the cyclist. Lovers of travel, history, adventure and sport will enjoy this book. It is informati...

What better way to kick-start your second half-century than by announcing to friends and family that, ‘At some point in the future, I shall be cycling solo round the world for two years’?After all, this is not only the province of macho males in their mid-twenties; middle-aged mums in mid-menopause also deserve a look-in.Eighteen months after this confident announcement, ignoring the imploring pleas from her frantic (grown-up) children and prising herself away from their fear...

By most people's standards, Josie Dew is hugely adventurous. By American standards, she is completely insane. For Americans drive everywhere: through cinemas, restaurants, banks, even trees. But driving past Josie as she pedalled across America was a new and alarming experience.On her eight-month journey Josie experienced it all; race riots in Los Angeles, impossible heat in Death Valley, Sexual Tantric Seminars in Hawaii. From Utah to the Great Lakes, via improbable places like Zz...

Two women, two bikes, no backup on a Sea to Sea adventure.At the beginning of the twenty-first century two friends set off to cycle from coast to coast across England. For one, it was to be the first of many long distance cycle rides.Cycling Across England is an account of the fun, the food, the mountains, the moorlands and the mathematics the two friends encountered along the way. From the Irish Sea, through the mountains of Cumbria and the Pennine uplands they travelled thr...

Dad was having a mid-life crisis. His teenage sons wanted to avoid summer jobs. The solution? Ride across America on bicycles. They set out from the east coast in June, loaded down and looking for adventure. They rode straight into the Appalachian Mountains, and into the hottest summer in recorded history. Sure, the pioneers struggled with starvation, disease, and wilderness. But did they have to pedal a loaded bike all day against the wind, wash in the sheriffs bathroom, and camp in 90 de...

What would you do if you realised that you had finally become too fat to wear your dad's pants? Pete Hepworth got his bike out and hit the trails of New Zealand, promptly suffering the indignity of being overtaken by some Danish pensioners. Along the way he met the cast of the Lord of the Rings movie in a seedy tattoo parlour in Wellington and many small marsupials with poor road sense.

In 2010 Susie Wheeldon and Jamie Vining rolled back into London complete with stings, bites, leathery skin and thighs of steel. With their co-rider, Iain Henderson, they had set out nine months earlier on a 12,000 mile round the world bike ride, promoting solar power and being tracked using solar nanotechnology.Only, as Google maps and your thumb are not the most precise tools with which to plan a global circumnavigation, they had instead ridden 13,500 miles across North Africa, pa...

Mostly dirt roads, a little pavement, some single track, and 100% adventure await on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route from Canada to Mexico. Cyclists dream of and plan for this life-list trip that starts in Banff, Alberta and rolls through 2,745 miles of wild mountainous beauty all the way to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. Michael McCoy and the Adventure Cycling Association (ACA) provide a segmented route guide for you to follow in its entirety or section ride to suit your schedule and st...

Jill Homer, a newspaper editor in the isolated, soggy hamlet of Juneau, Alaska, has an outlandish ambition: Racing a mountain bike 2,740 miles from Canada to Mexico along the Continental Divide. Her preparation plans are equally ambitious: A 350-mile winter bicycle race on Alaska's frozen Iditarod Trail, followed by two months of focused training during a summer sojourn with her boyfriend in the Utah desert.But in the tradition of best-laid plans, Jill's dream begins to unravel the ...

"Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure Stories from Alaska and Beyond" is a collection of essays from the Web site "Jill Outside." Jill Homer's intent with her lifestyle blog was to document daily adventures from the perspective of a nonathletic, small-town journalist who recently moved to Alaska. The blog quickly took on a life of its own, drawing readers from all over the world, who encouraged her to pursue a burgeoning interest in the extreme sport of snow biking.What followed is ...

Remember when you were a kid and you got your first bicycle? After a few weeks of mastering the dynamics of balancing, steering, and pedaling, all at the same time hopefully, your father released his protective, steadying grip on the seat and you went wobbling off on your own. It was probably your very first taste of independence and freedom and you knew you liked that feeling very much. Few things in life have ever compared to that first solo ride.Almost 40 years after my first so...

This true and very funny story involving six colleagues, some retired, proves the saying that we never really grow up - we just learn how to behave in public.On a sudden whim six men, mostly writers, decided to embark on a 1 000 kilometre cycle ride down the River Danube believing it would be downhill all the way. This was the first of many assumptions that proved to be not terribly correct.None had cycled since childhood nor even owned a bike.That first hilarious journey o...